PrototypeA pilot preview of the Synapse vision. Figures shown are illustrative.
Synapse
EU Energy Grid
Join the network
European renewable energy landscape with interconnected grid lines
Scenario platform · Austria · Czechia · Slovakia corridor

Test cross-border
energy community scenarios.

Synapse is a scenario platform for cross-border energy communities, helping municipalities, energy communities, regulators, grid stakeholders and investors test how renewable electricity, storage and flexibility could be shared across borders under different technical, market and regulatory conditions.

See what you can testPreview the Scenario Explorer
Test
Cross-border scenarios
Compare
Regulation, grid & market
Decide
Cooperation models
The problem

Fragmented by design.

Europe's energy system has the physical interconnection to act as one network, yet regulation, market rules and community models still stop at every border. Stakeholders lack a shared place to test what cooperation could actually deliver.

  • Regulation
    27 national frameworks define energy communities differently.
  • Grids
    Cross-border lines exist, but community-level access does not.
  • Markets
    Wholesale and retail rules stop at every national border.
  • Community models
    What is allowed in one country may be blocked in the next.
The vision

Technical infrastructure.
A shared mental space.

A European energy community is more than wires and inverters. It is a political idea, a continent that organises its energy together, and discovers it can organise much else together too.

Connect every layer

Plug local energy communities directly into both distribution and transmission grids, no longer isolated islands behind a single meter.

Bridge national systems

Reconcile divergent grid codes, market rules and voltages so electrons, and value, flow freely across borders.

Strengthen interconnectors

Reinforce existing cross-border lines and close the missing links that today bottleneck Europe's renewable potential.

Local · regional · European

Stack community structures from the village co-op to the cross-border consortium, sharing renewable resources at every scale.

Renewables-first integration

Use community-owned wind, solar and storage as the practical lever to support renewable integration and complement existing generation assets.

Build on what exists

Most building blocks, interconnectors, regulation, technology, are already here. Implementation can move fast.

What can you test?

Four scenario families, one platform.

Each scenario combines technical, market and regulatory assumptions so stakeholders can compare what is possible today with what becomes possible under a different design.

Solar surplus sharing

Generation · Storage

Test whether midday solar surplus from one community can be stored, used locally, or shared with a neighbouring community across the border.

Wind and hydro balancing

Cross-border flex

Explore how wind generation in one region could be balanced by storage, hydro or flexible demand in another.

Community-to-community trade

Markets · Rules

Model how two energy communities across Austria, Czechia or Slovakia could exchange renewable electricity under different market and regulatory conditions.

Local resilience under stress

Resilience

Assess how batteries, demand response, heat pumps, EV charging and local renewables could reduce exposure to price spikes or grid stress.

Pilot corridor

Austria ↔ Czechia ↔ Slovakia

This corridor offers a strong first testing ground because it combines physical interconnection, complementary generation profiles, industrial demand, renewable growth potential and regional cooperation needs. Decades of interconnection already exist between the three grids, Synapse builds on that foundation to test how community-level cooperation could work in practice.

🇦🇹

Austria

Hydro storage
Alps pumped reserve
400 kV cross-border
2 to CZ · 1 to SK
Communities ready
240+
🇨🇿

Czechia

Wind potential
Moravian highlands
400 kV cross-border
2 to AT · 3 to SK
Communities ready
180+
🇸🇰

Slovakia

Baseload + flex
Bohunice & Mochovce NPPs
400 kV cross-border
3 to CZ · 1 to AT
Communities ready
120+
Trilateral bidirectional flow
Already in place
Slavětice ↔ Dürnrohr · V424 Sokolnice ↔ Križovany · Wien-Südost ↔ Stupava
Gap to close
Harmonised community market access
Time to first pilot
12–18 months
Renewable potential dashboard

Wind, sun & storage across the corridor

Live snapshot of techno-economic renewable potential and resource quality for AT–CZ–SK. Sources: Global Wind Atlas 3.0, Global Solar Atlas 2.0, IRENA country profiles, and the most recent National Energy & Climate Plans.

🇦🇹

Austria

Alpine hydro + emerging wind

AT
Wind @ 100m
6.4 m/s
Solar GHI
1180 kWh/m²
Hydro share
60%
RES installed
22.4 GW
Build-out to 204022.4 / 48 GW
47% of techno-economic potential delivered
🇨🇿

Czechia

Wind highlands + rooftop solar

CZ
Wind @ 100m
5.9 m/s
Solar GHI
1130 kWh/m²
Hydro share
4%
RES installed
4.6 GW
Build-out to 20404.6 / 27 GW
17% of techno-economic potential delivered
🇸🇰

Slovakia

Nuclear baseload + solar uplift

SK
Wind @ 100m
5.2 m/s
Solar GHI
1240 kWh/m²
Hydro share
17%
RES installed
3.1 GW
Build-out to 20403.1 / 14 GW
22% of techno-economic potential delivered
Mean wind speed @ 100 m
5.8 m/s
Corridor average, viable for utility wind ≥ 5.5 m/s
Global horizontal irradiance
1183 kWh/m²·yr
Comparable to northern Italy, strong PV economics
Combined RES potential by 2040
89 GW
vs. 30.1 GW installed today

Figures are annual means at country level. Site-level resource varies; corridor interconnectors smooth diurnal and seasonal mismatch between Alpine hydro, Moravian wind and Pannonian solar.

Scenario Explorer

From a question to a defensible answer.

A guided five-step workflow turns a stakeholder question into a comparable scenario with quantitative outputs and a recommended cooperation model.

01
Select a region or community
Pick a municipality or community in the AT, CZ, SK corridor.
02
Add assets
Solar, wind, storage, EVs, heat pumps, flexible demand.
03
Choose a cross-border partner
Pair with a neighbouring community across the border.
04
Run a scenario
Surplus, shortage, price spike, congestion or balancing need.
05
See outputs
Energy shared, costs avoided, flexibility value, congestion risk and regulatory barriers.

Example outputs

Quantitative metrics every scenario can produce.

Demo schema
Renewable electricity shared
MWh
Avoided curtailment
MWh
Community savings
€/yr
Flexibility value
€/MW·yr
Congestion risk
Index
Interconnector dependency
%
Regulatory barriers
List
Cooperation model
Recommended
How it works

Four layers, one network.

  1. 01

    Local communities

    Households, cooperatives and municipalities pool rooftop solar, batteries, heat pumps and EVs into a single market participant.

  2. 02

    Regional clusters

    Communities aggregate at the distribution level, balancing surplus and demand across a region in real time.

  3. 03

    Cross-border consortia

    Clusters trade flexibility and renewables across interconnectors, a wind front in Czechia powering Vienna and Bratislava an hour later.

  4. 04

    European backbone

    A harmonised set of grid codes, market signals and governance turns 27 systems into one continent-wide energy organism.

Map of European energy network with glowing interconnections
Live flow
+12.4 GW
renewable capacity shared cross-border this hour
Who benefits?

Built for the whole value chain.

Synapse is designed to be useful to every stakeholder involved in planning, regulating, operating and financing cross-border energy communities.

Energy communities

Identify how local renewable surplus can create value beyond the local grid.

Municipalities

Explore cooperation opportunities with neighbouring border regions.

Regulators & policymakers

Understand which rules enable or block cross-border energy sharing.

Grid operators

Assess where community flexibility could reduce congestion and support balancing.

Investors & developers

Identify corridors where renewables, storage and demand can be combined into bankable projects.

Roadmap

Most pieces already exist.

That is the quiet good news of European energy. We do not need to invent the grid, we need to weave it together.

  1. Now

    Map the building blocks

    Interconnectors, community projects, regulatory frameworks, most pieces exist. We map them and identify gaps.

  2. 6 months

    Onboard pioneer communities

    First 50 communities across CZ and AT plug into the platform with shared market access.

  3. 12–18 months

    Cross-border pilot

    First community-to-community renewable trade across the CZ–AT–SK trilateral corridor under a harmonised contract.

  4. 3 years

    Continental scale

    Replicate the corridor model across 12 borders, accelerating renewable integration and strengthening cross-border flexibility.

Contribute to the commons

Power the project, power the community.

Synapse is a non-profit pilot. Every contribution funds open research, community onboarding and the social projects that make a cross-border energy commons possible.

Community pilots
Seed funding for local energy cooperatives joining the corridor.
Open research
Public datasets, regulatory studies and grid-code harmonisation work.
Open infrastructure
The platform itself, open-source, audited, free for communities.
Choose a contribution
€

Payments are not yet wired in this prototype. Contributions will be processed securely once the donation provider is connected. 100% of funds go to community and open infrastructure.

Build the grid that builds Europe.

Communities, utilities, regulators, researchers, we are assembling the founding network. Add your voice, your project, or your interconnector.

Pilot launching 2026 · CZ–AT–SK corridor